The metamorphic alchemy of the camera and mirror – “99 Variations”By The Dancing Photographer Kang Youngho

I brought a key (the camera), opened the door to the secret passage (the mirror),woke up my mythical archetypes, and lured them out into the world.I looked into the mirror, photographed myself, and created new images throughmy imagination. In other words, the mirror became the space where I am boththe director and the actor on stage. Looking into the mirror, dancing, and at thesame time photographing myself, daydreaming started to transform my talentinto magic, which allowed infinite metamorphoses. All that was importantat this point was their ‘relationship’ as well as not losing the link between ‘mypresent self’ and the ‘mirror-reflected me,’ or not desiring the position of thesubject but giving up the self in the midst of relationship. Then I started to meetmy third self. ‘I’ became expanded into ‘I’s,’ ever more numerous, and thenI went someplace that I will call the “imaginative realm.”I found about 99 ‘other me’s.’ 99 is a theoretical number that denotes myselfas a whole to be 100 minus one—‘my present self.’During the process, I discovered that there was androgyny (male and female inone body, mutant) hidden in myself. Heroic, warrior-like, aggressive, subjective,godly images were classified into ‘male images,’ while human, mythical,artificial, passive, inclusive, objective images were classified into ‘female images.’The remaining images were classified into ‘composite images’—neither godnor human, a mediating entity like a spirit or a fairy. They co-exist and areinterrelated.Shown so far, fragmented self-images—which also can be numerous Others—maintain the relationship of looking at one another through the cameraand the mirror even though they might seem scattered. Such a relationshiphas a certain order and structure. So, I am calling my work method “imagetelling”—a new genre. It is separate from and embraces “storytelling” at the sametime. I believe that “image-telling” can go beyond storytelling, which is basedupon linguistic imagination.Image-telling is the same as presenting spectators with the tools forimagination, something close to a new musical instrument, instead of alreadycompleted music or a story. Therefore, there can be no fixed story in imagetelling.It provides an opportunity for daydreaming and opens the door to theimagination. For that reason, for the title of my work, I decided to use the word“variation,” which is an important characteristic of the image-telling.After about 99 images, I will walk back along the road that I have traveled up tothis point and rethink the power of the imagination, the meaning of the images,and their relationship to myself.